September 28, 2020
Virginia’s Energy Storage Rules Are Being Written. Are They On the Right Track?
A year ago, Virginia did not register on the shortlist of interesting storage markets to watch. It didn’t register on the long list either — there simply wasn’t much happening.
That changed suddenly in the spring, when the legislature passed and Gov. Ralph Northam signed into law the Virginia Clean Economy Act, which mandates a phaseout of fossil fuels by 2045. The law included an energy storage mandate of 3.1 gigawatts to be installed by 2035, one of the most ambitious targets in the country.
ESA VP Jason Burwen is quoted in this article, speaking both on the level of scrutiny small projects would undergo and how the state could foster a diversity of storage for resilience.
“This level of scrutiny, if implemented, would slow the development of distributed storage, including aggregations,” said Jason Burwen, vice president of policy at the Energy Storage Association, in an email. “We are unaware of any jurisdiction where 100 kW storage projects require an additional process beyond local permitting and distribution interconnection.”
Safety and reliability is already assessed through other processes, Burwen added, and it is not clear why regulators think another layer of scrutiny is needed.
“There is also growing interest in customer-sited storage for resilience, particularly as extreme weather events have proven challenging in various states across the nation in recent years,” Burwen noted.
One way to encourage a diversity of use cases is to break the overall capacity mandate into different categories, Burwen said. For instance, the SCC could ask for a certain amount of transmission-connected storage, distribution-connected storage and behind-the-meter storage.